Why you need a Niche Market to find success in online business

I frequently get the question “How do you choose a profitable niche?”, “How do you choose a profitable angle?”, “How do you choose a profitable part?” of the internet. I’ve always avoided teaching on this folks, because, I don’t believe that there’s any one-size-fits-all answer. It varies per person. It varies depending on the type of niche that you’re going to go into. And, it varies over time.

And, so, when I do a training like this, I like it to be evergreen. I want it to be something that folks can use. I don’t want to create something that’s good for three weeks. I like to create something that is long term. And, yet, I get these questions a lot.

So, what I’ve done is I’ve put some thought into exactly how I can position this so that it’s something that everyone can use, and that offers you the various options. Almost like branches on a tree. Gives you different options. If this won’t necessarily work, you can do this. I’ll present it to you in such a way that you’ll be able to see the thought behind it. Because the truth of the matter is, even though it’s very, very difficult, I’m going to try and to that today.

It’s very, very difficult to give you, it’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all, but even a tree solution, where there’s 3 or 4 solutions, but there may still be a 5th or 6th solution. The truth of the matter is, if someone comes to me, and I do a private call with them, and I dig in, and I ask them a few questions, I can almost always, no matter what the niche is, I can almost always direct someone to a profitable corner of their niche.

Really, just by asking a handful of questions and digging in. They’re going to be different for each person. But, really being able to dig in, I’m able to come up with that. And, so the more I think about it, I say well, if I can come up with it, and if I give you enough information, then you should have a starting point to be able to come up with it for yourself.

Let’s Get Started

Without further ado, let’s kind of dig into it. There are two different starting points when you choose a niche. You may be looking for a niche or a sub-niche, or an angle in your niche, because you already have an interest in something. You have an interest, you know that that interest is something, well, it interests you. But, you don’t know what part of the business might be profitable. You don’t know what part of the business people are looking for information. One of the things it’s important for us to remember in this industry is, we can have the best information in the whole world, but if nobody is looking for that information, you’ll never sell any of it.

I want you to just imagine that you’ve created a brand new recipe, for a new salad. But, it’s absolutely disgusting, and nobody would ever want to eat it, nobody would want to serve it. You could make that recipe, and you could put it online. You could make pictures of it. You could put a price on it. It may be a phenomenal recipe. But, nobody wants it. Because it tastes bad. Nobody is going to be looking for it online. So, you won’t have any buyers.

When you’re in a position where you say. I have a particular interest. I want to be able to help people. I know there’s people out there who need help, but I don’t know exactly what they need help with. That’s what we’re kind of talking about right here. You have an interest, and you want to dig deeper. There’s another branch here. That is, you may be in this boat as you’re listening, you’ve got this idea that you want to get involved online, and all you want to do is make money. You don’t care what niche that you get involved in. All you want to do is make money.

I would submit to you, that until you develop an interest. You’ll probably never make money.

Here’s the thing, we hear a success story. You hear them on the radio, or the TV, an infomercial success story, every so often. Somebody will say, “Oh, all I wanted to do was to make money. And, I found a friend who was making money in a particular niche. And I just copied what he did, and oh, I’m making money too.”

The problem is, that’s a rare occurrence. Like, maybe one in a million, or one in two million.

The question is, you’re building your business right now. Do you want to take a one in a million shot? That you MIGHT be able to do something that will make you a full-time income. That might do really, really well. Or, do you want to be a part of a one in two shot, or one in three shot that you can build something solid?

The thing is, if you’re going into the business just for the sake and the purpose of making money. With NO outside interest at all. That’s exactly what I believe you have. You’ve got a one in a million, or one in two million shot.

Unless you’re willing to stake your family’s future, the other 999,999 slots on FAILURE. I think a lot of times when people hear odds like that, they’re like “Hey, one person did it! So, I can do it”. Hey, you’re right, you can do it.

But, if 999,999 other people failed, in order for that ONE person to succeed. What we’re really talking about is a 99.9999% failure rate.

Is that what you want? My guess is, it’s not.

In order for you to choose a niche where you’re going to make money … I believe … you’ve got to start with some interests.

Throw the money aside … forget about the money … find places online where people have needs, real needs. Then work on filling those needs. As you’re filling those needs, you can then look for pockets of needs where people are willing to pay money.

Because if people are willing to pay money, and there’s a lot of people that have that need, then you can make good money selling in that particular arena. But, if you just start from a position of making money, the odds are very, very slim.

In either case, whether you’re looking for a niche, or a sub-niche. Looking for that best angle. Or, if, unfortunately, you’re in the place where, hey, I just want to make money, I’ve got 1 or 2 ideas of things I might be interested in. What I’m getting ready to share with you will give you kind of the road map to making that happen.

The first thing that we have to do. We have to find out what are interests and needs that need to be met. We can brainstorm this, and by the way, rather than just giving you four different ways that you can do this. I want you to understand the why behind it. Because if you happen to be in a niche, or an interest, where the 3 or 4 ways I give you won’t work. If I give you the background for WHY you would use these, then you can find something that will work for you.

The bottom line is, what you’ve got to do is find out 2 things. Number 1, are there people in your interest area that have needs that are being unmet? And then 2, are the people who have needs that are unmet, are they willing to invest money with you?

You’ve got to find out both of those things.

Folks have talked about in the past, and it’s a fallacy, that you can just go online, do some quick research, find out how many people have needs, find out how much money they’re willing to spend, and well, voila, you have your answer. I don’t know that it EVER worked, but, if it ever worked, it doesn’t work anymore.

One of the old methods, and I think at one point I even taught an iteration of this, one of the old methods, when the internet was young. You would go online, and you would look for something that had lots of searches online, and it didn’t have too many advertisers. But, it had some. The theory was, if there were some advertisers, well some people must be making money. People don’t pay advertising if it’s not working in the long run. You might start out advertising, but after a few weeks, or a few months of not making money, they tend to quit. It just works that way.

We could look at some old formulas, and we could say, hey, if people are advertising, and lots of people are asking the question, well then, somebody is making some money, so maybe there’s room for one more entrant.

Another thing we could look at. We used to create these fancy algorithms to say if there’s 100k searches, but there’s only 5 advertisers, or whatever the case is, then we would say, well, now, that’s a competitive niche, that’s ultra-competitive, maybe stay out of it. All of these different types of things.

The truth of the matter is, that today, number 1, it’s much more difficult to get that search information. And, by the way, if you think you’re getting that search information today, double check. There’s a strong possibility that wherever you’re buying it from, is selling you information that’s really 3 years old. But, they’re recalibrating it so that it looks like new information. The reason I say that is, to the best of my knowledge, for the most part, the providers of that information are no longer providing it anymore. The raw data is no longer there.

Now, there’s a huge industry around selling that information. But, the information doesn’t really exist anymore. Certainly not, to my understanding, they way that it used to. If that’s the way they used to look at it, but it doesn’t work anymore. What else do we do? We’ll talk about that in the next post!

Let’s look at the root issue here.

The root issue is, we need people that have needs, and we need people who are willing to spend money. The easiest way for us to look at this. In fact, I want to give you an offline example:

I want you to imagine that you’re thinking about opening up a restaurant in your town. The first place that you would go to find out if maybe you needed a new restaurant in your town is to look and see what’s happening with the restaurant scene. Are people filling up the seats in at least some of the restaurants downtown? Now, if some of the restaurants are empty, and some of them are full, that doesn’t tell you that there’s no more hungry people.

If some of the restaurants are full, it tells you the food’s probably bad in those empty restaurants. But, if there’s a number of restaurants that are full, it probably indicates that there’s a demand for good food in your town.

That’s the first step.

Okay, some restaurants are full, so there must be a demand. There are hungry people. You sit outside with the binoculars and you watch how many people are coming around. You sit outside, you’re downtown, you set up 100 yards away, 50 yards away, you set up your binoculars, or telescope, and you watch in 10 restaurants, and you just count how many people go into each restaurant. At the end of an hour you know 970 people have gone into those combined 10 restaurants. There are 970 hungry people on Friday night between 6 and 7. This is a fact! We know this now. We know that there’s that many hungry people, and there’s 10 restaurants. If you open a restaurant, and yours is as good as everybody else’s, you’ve got a shot at generating 1/11th of all of that business. You know this.

Next you go granular. You say, ok, we know we’ve got 10 restaurants. 970 people. What if we sit somebody outside the door of every one of these restaurants. We hire 10 people to work maybe an hour. We just tick it off, how many people entered this door, how many people entered that door. And if you find that there’s a 97 person average on Friday night, some restaurants have maybe 300 people, some restaurants have only 5. What does this allow you to do?

It allows you to realize those restaurants have better food, or food that people like. Maybe there’s a Chinese restaurant, and Indian restaurant, American restaurant, French restaurant, Italian restaurant. You may say, well, the Italian restaurant is getting more customers. The Chinese restaurants not getting as many customers. Then maybe you have to go sample the food. Is it good food, or is it bad food?

Do you see where I’m going with this?

The only way that you’re going to be able to get information about whether or not your niche is going to be profitable, and whether there’s needs, without actually selling in the niche is to do some research – some searching. In your niche. I gave you this illustration because offline is the illustration that we can all really relate to. This idea of how would we determine if there’s room for one more restaurant. You realize, offline, that you need to do the work. It’s the same online.

No that you understand that market research, passion for a niche and interested people are all required for a good niche here is a video that will show you how to do market research.